March 8 was introduced as the “Day of the Women” early in the 20th century when it was called International Working Women’s Day. The first observance in the US was in 1908 and was organized by the Socialist Party of America. The communist government of the Soviet Union made it an official holiday soon after the Bolshevik revolution. This seems logical as the mother-child bond at home was never something celebrated among communists. Instead, a woman’s place was in the communist workforce, honored to do Drudgery for the State.

We’re hearing a lot more about the Day of the Woman this year than in previous years combined, at least in the United States. For example, there are calls for women to take part in a general strike on March 8. Schools around Washington, DC are engaging in political closures for it this year. The idea behind the strike is supposedly to help people see what it’s like to have “a day without women.” I’m not sure how working mothers feel about the last minute political closures that will keep their kids home. Maybe they’ll stay home with the kids? That would seem ironic. But, I suppose a day without K12 education these days should be welcomed as a day without brainwashing.

In any case, it all reminds me of a talk I gave around this time last year at the United National Conference on the Status of Women in New York. I was honored to speak on a panel about “Political Correctness and Gender Ideology” along with Michael Walsh, author of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, and Austin Ruse, president of C-FAM. C-FAM wrote the event up here: “UN Panel on Political Correctness Startles Young Social Justice Warriors.”

One of the great ironies today is that those who purport to support women are actively involved in the legal abolition of women. Think about it. Acceptance of gender ideology, specifically transgenderism, among feminists results in the erasure of women. Because if one’s biological sex is meaningless and interchangeable with something called “gender identity” then nobody is either male or female in the eyes of the law. It means, for example, that I am only a woman because I think I’m a woman. We should be challenging these folks to tell us exactly what a woman is. And why merely thinking about being male or female makes it so.

The central point in my presentation at the UN Conference was that censorship – and especially government sponsored censorship – is central to pushing through the agenda of gender ideology. The gender identity anti-discrimination laws require us all to reject the physical reality of our sex, and legally replace it with something called “gender identity.” This means that being male or female can only exist in our minds. So once that notion is enshrined in law you end up with severe limits on what you express not only about your perception of reality, but about yourself. Gender ideology does not tolerate physical sex distinctions. It is a universal requirement based in the premise of every one of its laws passed so far – that our sex is merely “assigned at birth.” So this restricts what you may express about your own physical reality, your own personal identity, and your own relationships.

Gender ideology absolutely requires a regime of political correctness – or political conditioning – that manipulates the fears of social isolation in people in order to get them to self-censor. Once self-censorship like this takes hold, a society can be induced to conform to any agenda at all. It takes on a life of its own.

I discussed the four main ways gender ideology serves as a vehicle for consolidating the power of the state. I also wrote up my experience at the event in the Fall 2016 issue of The Human Life Review in an article entitled, “Transgenderism: A Creature of Political Correctness.”

A few months ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for the Federalist entitled “The Trans-Aged Deserve Equal Rights, Too.” I’ve made this point before, a few years ago: here and here. But don’t you agree it’s high time we take this seriously now that the Obama Administration’s directive on “gender identity” puts the social engineering of our humanity in high gear?

I say that if gender identity is a protected category for non-discrimination, age identity should be as well. Why not? Those who call for age identity non-discrimination have a parallel grievance with those who call for gender identity non-discrimination: their identity does not match the age they were “assigned at birth.”

In fact, I can say with all honesty that I do not identify with my age “assigned at birth.” Do you? I imagine the percentage of the population who feel this way are far greater than those who feel dysphoria over their gender identity. And yet a 52-year old who identifies as 71 can be turned down for medicare. A 12-year-old who identifies as 20 is forced to stay in a middle school classroom. And so on.

There is nothing to lose by pressing legislators (and judges) today to add age identity as a new category to non-discrimination law. We should be asking presidential candidates if they would support laws to halt age identity discrimination, especially if they support the social engineering that comes with the transgender thing.

Here are some excerpts from my piece:

Just as transgender activists will tell you not to conflate gender with sex, so no one should conflate age with time. Trans-aged individuals are just as entitled to anti-discrimination protection as transgender individuals.

Obama and his allies in Congress fully accept the idea that gender identity is a person’s self-perception of their gender whether or not it “aligns” with the sex they were “assigned at birth.” But they brazenly ignore a far more common source of inequality: total lack of equal protection for those whose self-perception of their age does not match up with the socially constructed date they were assigned at birth.

Discrimination on the basis of age identity is rampant in education, medicine, and employment, just for starters. I dare say it is orders of magnitude more common than discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Think of the 12-year-old who self-identifies as 19, but is stuck in a middle-school classroom. Think also of the 58-year-old who knows she is 75 but is ineligible for Social Security, and must suffer loss of benefits in silence. Let’s have some compassion for the 22-year-old (not to mention the 72-year-old) who knows he is 18 but is nevertheless not permitted to become an Eagle Scout, or even a Boy Scout. And what about the 69-year-old teacher who is forced into retirement even though she knows she is but 49—and is thereby deprived of living an authentic life?

The other day Public Discourse ran my piece entitled “A De-Sexed Society is a De-Humanized Society.” It was my analysis of President Obama’s directive to enforce a transgender policy on all K-12 bathroom and locker room facilities throughout the nation. We need to understand that this project has nothing to do with “gender identity” or civil rights for anybody. That’s the pretext, sure. But the endgame is to abolish all sex distinctions in law. That’s definitely the trajectory we’re on. We can already see the telltale signs with government documents such as passport applications no longer allowing for the identification of mother and father, but only the more generic term “parent.” In Canada, nine plaintiffs to the high court have sought to have sex distinctions removed from all birth certificates.

So obviously, this agenda applies universally. We need to get that through our heads. It’s not about transgender individuals. They are merely the vehicles, the pawns that the administration is using to push this project through. But in the end, it’s about every single one of us. It means we are all in the de-humanizing process of being legally “de-sexed.” And like sheep to the slaughter, so many of us just don’t seem to get it.

This “gender identity” nonsense is the cornerstone of probably the biggest social engineering project in human history. That’s because it will allow the mass state to treat us only as isolated individuals, separated from our familial relationships. When the State no longer has to recognize the existence of “male” or “female,” would it have to recognize the existence of a husband and wife or a mother and father? I don’t think so. Nor any other biological relationship. And therefore, no relationships at all. This would eventually wipe out spousal immunity, which means the state can force spouses to testify against one another in court. It puts the State in a stronger position to regulate personal relationships. As you know, my theme on this blog is that personal relationships are the source of all real power. So if you go along with this transgender project, I believe you are ceding that power to the state (for everybody) whether you know it or not.

Of course, no law can make reality go away. But the force of law can manipulate you to behave as though reality has gone away. Here’s an excerpt from my article, which I hope you’ll read:

What will happen when all of society is sexless in both language and law? If the law does not recognize your body as physically male or female—applying only the word “gender” to your internal, self-reported self-perception—does the law even recognize your body? Every single cell of you has either “male” or “female” written into its DNA, but the law refuses to recognize such categories. Such laws will only recognize an infinite, immeasurable “gender spectrum,” your place on which is determined only by your mind. So what exactly are you after the law has de-sexed you? In what sense is your body a legal entity?

And what happens to your familial relationships after the law has de-sexed you? Are they legally recognized? I don’t see how they could be. Certainly not by default, certainly not by the recognition that each child comes through the union of two opposite-sex parents.

In the end, there is nothing “brave” about this new world chaos. Just sheer insanity.

The symbol of the transgender movement combines astrological symbols for male (Mars) and female (Venus) with shades of blue and pink. (Wikimedia Commons) Even if I didn’t know what it stood for, I’d take pause because it just feels so swastika-ish.

The other day I published an essay at The Federalist about the political significance of South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard’s caving to the mafia-style tactics of the LGBT lobby. He was the latest in a string of GOP governors who are shrinking from laws that protect freedom of conscience as well as children’s privacy. You can read it here: “South Dakota’s Governor Tucks Tail, and Runs from LGBT Mafia.”

After the South Dakota legislature passed a bill to allow schools to maintain separate restroom and locker room facilities for males and females, Gov. Daugaard actually vetoed the bill. His veto was basically the result of the craven cronyism that has saturated the corporate world. Big business has been infused with the LGBT agenda for decades now, and their leaders at Chambers of Commerce everywhere generally do the bidding of the LGBT lobby. In addition to corporate pressure, Daugaard personally met with transgender activists who no doubt played victim while making clear that anything less than a veto would get him publicly tarred and feathered.

That article followed on one I co-authored last week with with Joy Pullmann: “The Transgender War Against Science, Human Rights, and Consent.” In it we investigated legislation – such as that passed by South Dakota’s legislature – that would allow access to school children’s restrooms and locker rooms to continue as it always has: according to anatomical sex. Another South Dakota bill was aptly titled “An Act to Ensure Government Nondiscrimination in Matters of Religious Beliefs and Moral Convictions.” In other words, if you have serious beliefs about sex, marriage, and children, you needn’t be forced to perform acts that violate your conscience or totally gag yourself for fear of being fired. But that bill was tabled, which is a grim sign for the future of freedom of conscience.

We had high hopes that Governor Daugaard of South Dakota would stand strong on principle and sign that legislation into law — or at least take no action and allow it to become law. But between the well-monied LGBT lobby and the business world it controls, it seems a pipe dream to expect any official to stand on principle these days. The irony is that probably 90 percent of the population is on board with the South Dakota legislation to support freedom of conscience and privacy. But the heckler’s veto can be a strong one if good people remain silent in the face of it.

Here are a few excerpts from that article on how the LGBT heckler’s veto works:

Their prescription was to first de-sensitize the public. Then to “jam” or suppress every word of dissent. Finally, everyone must convert. This cultivates a conditioned population. Once we are conditioned in this manner, we end up accepting agendas and programs that we’d at least question if our society respected clear and free thinking. Instead, people either self-censor or conform to the party line out of hope for social acceptance.

Representative government requires the citizens, who are themselves the source of our government’s authority, to be able to openly discuss social questions among themselves and consequently direct their representatives.

If we are afraid or taught not to speak, representative government cannot happen. Tiny factions like the LGBT lobby wield power over an unwilling populace, which breeds resentment against government for not aligning with our priorities. Political correctness therefore eviscerates government by consent; under it, government operates based on brute force, which escalates public disapproval in a constant cycle until the social repression is broken—sometimes with (God forbid) violence.

Few people have considered my thesis which is stated in the title above. Most assume the transgender movement is just a simple matter of protecting from discrimination a tiny demographic — .03 percent of the population who consider themselves transgender. Far from it. When you consider the enormous degree of state-sponsored censorship that is required by the movement — and the punishments meted out to people of conscience by each and every one of the laws its activists seek to pass — a far different story reveals itself.

Last week I spoke about all of this to an audience at the Family Research Council in Washington. You can watch the video by clicking on this link:

My goal was not to discuss the finer points of “gender identity” and what being transgender means for any particular individual. Instead, I focused on the broader and bigger picture of what the transgender ideology means for society at large. Transgenderism is an ideology that is based on the presumption that all human beings have something called a “gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Notice how the word “assigned” is used to hide the reality that your biological sex is based in physical reality. This premise is written into every gender identity non-discrimination law. It basically aims to legally erase male and female sex distinctions. It applies universally — to each and every one of us.

The implications are vast — for our language, for our relationships, for preserving a free society. There can be no question that all of the gender identity anti-discrimination laws amount to little more than censorship laws, intended to modify everybody’s behavior and everybody’s language on pain of punishment.

So, in short, the transgender movement is operating as a vehicle for conformity of thought. And in the end, that means it is a vehicle for dismantling freedom – in the name of freedom – and for building the power of the State. In the end, it puts laws into place that abolish the right to free expression and suppress independent thought. The power of the state enters that vacuum, as it always does under such circumstances.

I’ve identified four features of the transgender movement that serve as indicators of its role as a vehicle for state centralization of power:

Transgenderism is such an extreme form of individualism that accommodating it in law will only create a vacuum for State power. By its very nature it demands that an individual’s inner sense of reality trump any commonly held understanding of reality. This makes it unsustainable. Its extreme individualism demands the breakdown of society’s mediating institutions – such as family, faith, and private associations — that serve as buffer zones that protect the individual from State meddling.

Transgenderism sows chaos into the language, requiring us all – universally and without exception – to accept a seismic change in the definition of what it means to be human, and what relationships mean, particularly family relationships. Freedom of speech and association are casualities.

It requires a very aggressive program of censorship in order to sustain itself and prop up its illusions over any commonly understood reality.

It depends on a very aggressive campaign of agitation and propaganda to condition people to get with the program.

It thereby sows the conditions for totalitarianism. We have no choice but to speak out in the face of its censorship. For more, see my talk at the link above. And let’s never forget that free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

Anyone who can see the reality of sex distinctions understands that women are more emotionally invested in pregnancy than men. So it is undeniable that women are the biggest losers in a society that promotes casual sex. So who are the prime “beneficiaries” of abortion on demand? Women? Or the men who wish to use and then discard women?

Clearly, it’s the latter. The dirty little secret is that it wasn’t really grassroots women activists who got abortion legalized, though they carried the sound bites. A little history shows us that abortion on demand was really an operation from the top down. Establishment men were the ones who pushed hardest for it and made it happen. Elitist men in the courts and legislatures made it happen. Feminists? They basically ran cover for them right through the Roe v. Wade decision handed down by seven male Supreme Court justices in 1973. Oh, sure, these men would couch it all in terms of “women’s rights” and hold themselves up as champions of women. Very convenient. Big of them. Easy too, because their feminist allies were their subservient enablers.

Another point is that women have always polled consistently more pro-life than men. The margin may not be huge, but it’s a persistent gap.

In my article, I discuss a recent Vanity Fair piece that’s laid bare the wasteland of the hook-up culture spawned by our abortion culture. Many defend hooking up by claiming: “This is 2015 and things have changed.” I can only respond: “This is a total throwback to ancient times. And nothing has changed.” The Vanity Fair essay is hard to read with its descriptions of men and women using the Tinder app — which you can see in the ad above — obsessively looking for sex partners in the near vicinity.

But it was all so predictable: jerk men taking advantage of women who are clearly looking for intimacy but pretend they are not. The irony revealed by the Vanity Fair article is that the women hooking up don’t even enjoy the sex. And the men are so steeped in competing with other men for conquests — through the “wonders” of phone app technology — that in their 20’s and 30’s they have an epidemic of erectile dysfunction. It’s all so pointless and stupid, aside from being cruel and destructive.

“Abortion really makes you hate men,” is an apt quote from a college classmate after she told me about her abortion. This clarified for me that abortion is like Total Warfare on personal relationships. It’s all about separating us from one another. It severs the mother-child bond as well as the man woman bond. (The father-child bond was the first casualty.) The abortion mentality requires destructive coping mechanisms in which the women must emotionally separate themselves from the person of the child as well as from the father.

So much love has gone missing through the descent into our culture’s abortion mindset. People have lost so much respect for life, for others, and for themselves. Intimacy has become elusive for so many. And happiness? So much of it gone, in the name of “choice.”

There is a common thread that runs through all agendas that increase the power of the State: Separation of human beings from one another. Obamacare meddles in the doctor-patient relationship. Common Core meddles in the teacher-student relationship. Excessive regulation of businesses meddles in the customer-merchant relationship. No fault divorce meddles in the husband wife relationship and the child-parent relationship. Abortion especially meddles in the mother-child relationship. Same sex marriage meddles in the child-parent relationship by insisting that no child needs — nor should they even desire — a relationship with both of their biological parents, parents of both sexes. We can deny these facts all we like, but the State’s role in separating us undeniably exists in each of these policies.

Central planning has always been about separating and isolating people. And the attack on the family has always been about centralizing the power of the state for the benefit of the few elites in control of it.

“Marriage equality” and transgenderism has been such a centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s transformation agenda precisely because undefining marriage jump starts the process of separating families. The separation of families inevitably snowballs into the separation of people in other kinds of relationships, particularly friendships. Family breakdown can’t help but play a key role in the breakdown of social trust and the disintegration of once functioning and vibrant communities. Every totalitarian society depends upon a sense of alienation among its people. Central planning agendas are always pushed in the name of something positive-sounding like “love makes a family” or “authenticity” or any number of platitudes. Tyrannies always claim to support the very thing they intend to destroy.

The marketing boom in artificial reproductive technologies — especially for same sex households — shows us the extent to which ART serves to deliberately sever a child’s bond with either the mother or the father or both. Transgenderism separates us at perhaps an even more intimate level, because it ultimately renders all sex distinctions meaningless, thus separating us from our identities as either male or female, father or mother, son or daughter. This may seem counter-intuitive in an age when transgender individuals like Bruce Jenner portray an exaggerated image of the female persona. But the ultimate goal of gender theory is the obliteration of all sex distinctions. We might say that the Jenner phenomenon simply manifests the “transitional” moment we are passing through in the interim.

We ought to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the LGBT agenda was ever about the rights of a minority demographic. It’s always been a convenient vehicle towards the centralization of power. Which depends upon human separation. Always in the name of togetherness.

The media and Hollywood do little but feed and cultivate attitudes of self-absorption. Academics also foster self-absorption in their college students who now can’t read literary classics because the content is too “triggering” for their tender emotions. We should ask: How on earth can people have real relationships or establish any kind of true community if everyone is so obsessed with their own delicate sensibilities? The answer is: we can’t.

Healthy personal relationships need a foundation of common reality and common language through which people can communicate. Most of all, they need a common belief that there is inherent worth and dignity in all human beings, not just themselves.

So as more folks sink deeper into believing life is all about them, they are more liable to end up like Bruce Jenner: obsessed by the urge to project an imagined persona everywhere and eager to suck up whatever oxygen might be in any given room. Or like abortionists who must callous their souls in order to live day to day.

As the Arthur Ashe award in honor of Jenner’s gender transition proved the other night, we seem close to hitting rock bottom. Turning one’s fetish into a cause celebre might be a nervy thing to do, but it doesn’t resemble the virtue we’ve traditionally called “courage.” All the less so because of the heaping helpings of adulation, support, doting, protection, fawning, and heavy shielding the media and special handlers have been giving Jenner for doing so.

In fact, nary a word has been spoken about Bruce Jenner’s fault in a February car crash that killed a woman and left several others injured. (Though one of the drivers involved has publicly pointed out that Jenner’s lack of personal responsibility made him ill suited for the award.)

Against this scenario of craven self-worship and self-obsession, it shouldn’t surprise us that a top abortionist and director at Planned Parenthood would brag about harvesting organs from unborn children. Deborah Nucatola told undercover associates of the Center for Medical Progress how she personally goes about this with babies up to 24 weeks gestation. She was videotaped saying:

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part. I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

It’s a ghoulish business that shocks people of conscience. But we live less and less in a society that respects and understands the value of conscience. Instead, Planned Parenthood reflects the attitude of Dr. Josef Mengele who conducted experiments on prisoners in Nazi Germany. And, of course, of its founder Margaret Sanger who was a full blown eugenics enthusiast whose counsel the Nazis sought in the 1930’s.

How did our culture get to this place? I think, in part, by accepting the antiquated notion of “modernity” or “progress” as though it is something enlightened. Using abortion as a means of sexual “liberation” only serves to numb us, to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. There’s no room for true human connection in such putrefied places devoid of human worth.

At the Magazine Stand: Bruce Jenner on cover of People Magazine, January 2015

Bruce Jenner’s Vanity Fair stunt, photo by Annie Leibowitz, June 2015

Today I just want to offer some links for reading about the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner hype. I have not yet weighed in on this with a published article of my own, but I hope to soon.

So, the other day we had a much-ballyhooed Vanity Fair cover story in which the gold medal winner of the men’s decathlon in the 1976 Olympics “came out” as a woman. Whether or not Jenner looks convincing or glamourous on the cover is neither here nor there as far as the endgame of the Transgender Project is concerned. The endgame is to erase all sex distinctions in law. The Jenner publicity stunt is basically a tool to affect and direct public opinion as a means of moving forward on that goal. The agenda is far more expansive and invasive than normalizing the desire to “present” as male or female in public.

I commend to you the following articles, if you have not already read them. These four all appeared in the Federalist:

Many prefer just to turn their heads away from all of this, and I understand that. But it is crucial that we pay attention and weigh in – and push back – because it affects all of us: through the corruption of our language, through modification of our behavior, and through coercion and anti-speech laws.

We have already seen how the forces behind this movement have been conducting a war on language in which any “misgendering” of pronouns is considered an act of discrimination, or even hate. None of this bodes well for liberty in society. A good way to push back is to question the pronoun protocols and to resist them. Why resist? Because it’s not really about “gendering” the transgender person. It’s about de-sexing you, by default. It does this through the enforced language, which pulls you into accepting the fiction that everybody’s sex — including yours — does not exist in physical reality, but only in the mind.

I’d like to add, incidentally, that I don’t object in everyday life to calling someone by their preferred name, transgender or not. But there is a difference between that and being lured into a trap of language corruption through pronouns usage that basically redefines humanity for everyone. I hope to write about that soon. This corruption of language also has the effect of short-circuiting our ability to communicate freely with one another. It sows distrust and that is a force that aims to separate us all. As George Orwell noted, the corruption of language puts us at the mercy of tyrants.

In short, we really are dealing with a war on reality itself. Sadly, it’s a train wreck that’s been a long time coming.

When children are separated from their biological parents, they are gravely wounded. Sure, they can develop coping mechanisms. But they suffer a primal wound that cannot and should not be ignored. I think the more we disregard the bond of child to mother and father, the more we devolve as a society into grave injustice towards children. And it doesn’t matter if a woman agrees to donate her egg or if a man happily donates his sperm or if a surrogate contracts to give up a child in exchange for money or for any other reason. The child will experience any such act as a loss. We need to stop looking at children as commodities to satisfy adult desires. If we keep hurtling down this path of human separation — separation that has roots in no fault divorce, the sexual revolution and abortion on demand — we will all end up enslaved by a bureaucratic state.

From “Anti-Slavery Almanac,” 1840

So today I recommend you read some recent documents that have historic significance. They are amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court written by adult children from same sex households, in opposition to same sex marriage. They are writers and scholars who understand – from their unique perspective of being severed from a birth parent and deliberately deprived of an opposite sex parent– that children have an inherent right to know their origins wherever possible. When deprived of the love and knowledge of a birth parent, it’s a loss and a scar that doesn’t go away.

Here’s the reality: same sex marriage absolutely requires that the state accept and encourage the separation of children from their biological parents. This is the trajectory it puts us on, even if we don’t quite feel its effects on society just yet.

Three amicus briefs were filed by six defenders of marriage. Dawn Stefanowicz and Denise Shick filed jointly here:

Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

Professor Lopez argues persuasively that same sex marriage is on a collision course with the natural rights of children. The Fourteenth Amendment should more appropriately be applied to children in this case. Otherwise, it severs them from the right to know their origins, and does so without due process. Here’s an excerpt from Lopez’s brief:

The Court should refer to the Fourteenth Amendment clause about equal protection of the laws, in order to uphold laws that define marriage as only male-female. In upholding such laws the Court would ensure that citizens with gay parents have equal protection both as minors and as adults, and that such citizens will not be estranged from their father or mother without due process.

In truth it is gay marriage that will create a suspect class of children targeted for the denial of essential civil and human rights. Gay marriage will allow adults to acquire custody of other people’s children and deny those children connections to their original mother and father. Other problems flow from this initial denial of the basic human right to be connected to one’s origins. What the Court must weigh now is the competing application of the Fourteenth Amendment to two distinct classes: [a] gay and lesbian couples who want children, and on the other hand, [b] COGs. [children of gays]

It really looks like we are all being set up to cede our rights to know our parents and our origins.